INDIAN-AMERICAN

Sunita Williams undertakes spacewalk after 12 Years, tackles key ISS repairs

Monday, 20 Jan, 2025
(Photo courtesy: Wikipedia.org)

Indian-origin NASA astronaut Sunita Williams on Thursday stepped out of the International Space Station (ISS) for a spacewalk along with colleague Nick Hague, the US space agency said. 

This is Williams' first spacewalk in 12 years, and the eighth in her career, while it's Hague's fourth. The mission designated US Spacewalk 91, is expected to last around six and a half hours. 

The astronaut-duo is currently working to perform maintenance tasks and replace hardware, NASA said. 

“NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Suni Williams, step outside of the Space_Station to support station upgrades, including repairs to our NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer) X-ray telescope. 

In a blog post, NASA informed that Williams and Hague will work to replace a rate gyro assembly that helps provide orientation control for the station and install patches to cover damaged areas of light filters for NICER. They will also replace a reflector device used for navigational data on one of the international docking adapters. 

In addition, the pair will check access areas and connector tools that will be used for future maintenance work on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. 

NASA also informed a second spacewalk, scheduled to begin at 8:15 a.m. on January 23.